Automated Quality Assurance for a Floor-Tiling Robot

The paper describes the second stage in the development of the floor-tiling robot — SHAMIR. Both the development and the performance measurements of the robot were carried out with a graphic simulation system. It was decided to concentrate, at this stage of the development, on the robot's autonomy at a workstation, which means that all operations at a workstation — stabilizing and calibrating, loading tiles, etc. — including real-time quality assurance (QA) are done without human intervention, while the transfer between workstations is assisted by an operator. The QA function is needed in order to allow accurate placing of the tiles in straight lines and with a uniform distance between them. Additionally, the QA function has to identify defective tiles. A computer vision system was developed to perform the QA functions. The prototype, its operational principles, and the experiments are described.